Dear Friends and Colleagues,

It seems to me to be a wonder, whenever we find ourselves thinking about Holy Week events, that the possibility exists for some of the same people who yelled “Crucify” to have followed the Lord with sorrow and weeping when the great bar of His Cross was laid upon His shoulders while He staggered up the road (the “Via Dolorosa”) to Calvary. Indeed, might some of the “Crucify”-criers have even been those who had joined in the “Hosanna” when he had ridden into Jerusalem to triumphant shouts just a few days before?  That seems to be the view of the writer of these well-known words in the hymn “My song is love unknown":

Sometimes they strew his way,

And his sweet praises sing;

Resounding all the day

Hosannas to their King.

Then ‘Crucify’

Is all their breath,

And for his death

They thirst and cry.

Is it possible for someone to change his or her mind so quickly? 

Or is it rather that we are witnessing - in that time as in our own time - the very same human phenomenon that Dr. Robert Malone has recently advertised as “Mass Formation Psychosis”?  This happens when the mental pressure of numbers (or a mass) of people operates on an ever-widening circle of individuals so that they too allow their minds to be “taken over” by the opinions of those assumed to be right, and indeed to become themselves formed into the same “mass” as those they assume, by virtue of their weightiness, to be right in what they express. They do not evaluate because they assume the correctness of the “mass” of which they are themselves becoming a part. 

Mass formation psychosis is dangerous. It enables bad leaders such as Hitler or Stalin or Mao or Pol Pot (and other lesser characters) to attract to themselves and their warped perspectives a vast mass of people who, because of this condition have divorced themselves from independent thought. In subtle ways George Orwell in his dystopian works Animal Farm and 1984 depicted to an extreme this dangerous phenomenon. 

I cannot help but think that mass formation psychosis is operating today, and perhaps more powerfully than we care to think, when large populations, with the extra help of television and the print media, become part of a great “mass” that accepts without independent thought what is effectively the dictates of a few, as it touches health care: and this to the extent that it becomes quite frequent that personal doctors who because of their expertise, their personal observations and such data as they can amass, desiring, for the benefit of their patients, to use treatments falling outside the centrally prescribed guidelines, actually find themselves in peril of being struck off their registers and forbidden to practise their craft. 

If it had been like this in the reign of Victoria, a great many more people would have died of cholera than actually was the case, even with the significant professional opposition at that time to medical research. 

So what, then, of today? Mass formation psychosis can be operating without general detection not just in one field of thought and study but in several.

The Collect for the Twelfth Sunday after Trinity is

Almighty and everlasting God, who art always more ready to hear than we are to pray, and art wont to give more than either we desire or deserve: Pour down upon us the abundance of thy mercy; forgiving us those things whereof our conscience is afraid, and giving us those good things which we are not worthy to ask, but through the merits and mediation of Jesus Christ, thy Son, our Lord. Amen.

The prayer is all about the manner of our thinking and about how the “Almighty and everlasting God” is ready to change our minds from what we, by ourselves and by the influences around us, are prone to engage in automatically (as we might say). The prayer directs us to the ever-readiness and abundance of God, “wont to give more than either we desire or deserve”, because of the “abundance” of the mercy that we pray Him to “pour down upon us”. The supplication to Almighty God is immense, stretching to “forgiving us those things whereof our conscience is afraid, and giving us those good things which we are not worthy to ask.” Such supplications would indeed be unrealistic were it not for the "merits and mediation of Jesus Christ, thy Son, our Lord” which are more than a match for the immensity of the prayer.

And indeed, more than a match for the insidious influence upon us of the "mass formation psychosis" to which we are all prone by our innate tendencies thoughtlessly to “pick up” the views and opinions of the “big people” of the world by one medium or another. Let us be in touch with and never far from our mighty (indeed almighty) God.

For directions about the services this Sunday the 4th September 2022, the 12th Sunday after Trinity, please see the website www.TruthWithLanguage.com .

In faith in the holy Name of our Lord Jesus, who will continue to provide guidance and joy by the Holy Spirit to all His people.

+ Nicholas